The process of determining the location of a user's computing device is sometimes referred to as geolocation. There are many types of Internet-based applications that use or rely on geolocation. Many social network applications, for example, allow a user to report or “check in” using his or her current location. Other applications may provide different features or different configurations for users in different geographic locations, or may disable certain functions depending on the locations of users.
Geolocation is also an important aspect of certain risk monitoring and fraud prevention tools. As a simple example, a credit card processing service may attempt to determine whether or not an order is being placed from near a customer's reported shipping address and if not, the order may be flagged as having a relatively higher probability of being fraudulent.
There are various ways to determine or estimate the actual location of a computing device. In some situations, for example, the device may be asked to provide its GPS (Global Positioning System) coordinates. However, it is possible for a fraudster to defeat certain types of geolocation techniques and to cause a device to report a location other than its actual location.